My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  After Margaret moves to Oakland, she keeps organizing and working in women’s centers there. When I visit her, we reminisce about the two dozen campuses we visited together in less than one year—but our conversation always comes back to TWU.

  Thirty-five years pass before I’m back on that campus again. This time I’m campaigning for Hillary Clinton in her 2008 primary race for the presidency, and speaking together with Jehmu Greene, a young African American woman who, like me, has decided, after much soul-searching, to campaign for Clinton—because of her longer experience in battling the ultra-right wing—and to support Obama in the future. Now this campus is offering a master’s degree in women’s studies, though many others still don’t offer even a women’s studies major. Rarer still, TWU will soon offer a Ph.D. It also encourages men as well as women to enter its nursing program. Most unusual, a student cannot graduate without taking a course in multicultural women’s studies. No wonder Oprah Winfrey has spoken here—twice. Except for a library still famous for its cookbook collection, the campus bears little resemblance to the past.

  After our brief talks and a lively discussion about getting out the vote, one woman comes up to tell me that she was on campus when Margaret and I were here decades ago. She calls our visit “shock therapy” that began a year of organizing. The TWU human rights movement forced the administration to deal with student grievances, took on sexism and racism together, and is now working with undocumented immigrants in North Texas.

  I have to tell her that Margaret, who moved with her daughter to California about a year after we were at TWU, died after a long illness at only fifty-seven. Her daughter held a memorial in California, and together, we organized one in New York. It’s hard to believe that Margaret isn’t here on this campus where she was once so alive.

  “You know the hospital shows on television?” this woman asks. “When someone’s heart stops and has to be restarted with electric paddles? That’s what you and Margaret did for us. Please tell her daughter our hearts have been going ever since.”

  · We learn most where we know the least. For me, this means Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the only institution of higher learning in the world that is designed for students who are deaf. It’s a revelation.

  I arrive there in 1983 to spend a day meeting students, then giving a lecture in the evening. Aside from the fact that I need an interpreter, this campus seems like any other. Students ask me how we started Ms. magazine, since they’re thinking of starting a magazine on campus. I ask them about the courses they love. There is a controversy about the presidency. Students want a role in choosing the next one, so they at last will have a leader who is also deaf and understands their world. We talk about tactics for making that happen, from petitions to tuition strikes. I see that it’s harder to take risks when there is no other campus like the one you’re on, yet they’re determined. Like more than 80 percent of the students here, those I meet come from hearing families, and they value this short time of being with people who share their experience and culture.

  I know enough to look at the person speaking to me, not at the interpreter who is making sign language audible for my benefit. I have the feeling of understanding and being understood.

  But the more time I spend with the Gallaudet students, the more I enter into a world where liveliness of expression is a universal art form. Because their words are kinetic and their faces expressive, I feel as if I’m fully present in conversation in a rare way. I know how much I would be missing without a signer as the bridge, but an effort is being made to include me. Young women tell me how misinterpreted they feel in, say, a room full of hearing men, given the stereotype of deaf women as doubly helpless, no matter how strong they really are. I learn how much less likely a deaf woman is, statistically speaking, to be employed or married or in a long-term relationship—even less than her male counterparts—given this double standard. Yet both the men and women are so fast, subtle, and nuanced in talking to me and to each other that I feel as if my audible words are like bricks, and their visual ones are sea shells and feathers.

  Ever since Judy Heumann and other disability activists made the point of inclusion in Houston in 1977, feminist speakers have been better about asking that a meeting provide signing and be wheelchair accessible, although it doesn’t always happen. At Gallaudet, however, there is not just one signer where the audience can see him or her and I cannot, but one on each side of the stage, and also on each of a dozen or so special platforms around the audience. This means I can see a chorus of motion while I’m speaking. There is also the signing of lyrics and poetry. It’s like watching a ballet—a democratic ballet that everyone could learn if we tried.

  By the time I leave the signing world for the world of the hearing, I’m not quite the same person. I’ve seen an expressive, visual world that isn’t like the one I’ve been walking around in. Coming home, I feel let down. Where are all those expressive people?

  Five years later, I read that the student movement there, with the wonderfully direct name Deaf President Now, has succeeded. In 1988 Gallaudet University finally hires its first deaf president and even appoints a first deaf chair of its board of trustees. This is a long overdue victory on a campus where Abraham Lincoln authorized the first degrees. I also see that on other campuses, activists are framing deafness and disability as a civil rights issue, not as a medical problem that needs fixing. They are developing a whole new field called disability studies. Like black studies and women’s studies, these programs begun by a social justice movement are about changing the system to fit people, not the other way around. Since disability may be a state that people both enter and leave—from skiing accidents to combat injuries, from giving birth to aging and crutches—ramps instead of steps turn out to be important to most people at some time in their lives. A few are even citing the 360 million deaf people in the world—or the million in this country—and studying sign language as a language requirement.

  Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine? Thanks to those Gallaudet students, I can imagine it.

  · On campuses that offer courses in hospitality training or hotel management, visitors often stay in a hotel that is the practice lab for students. I’m having coffee in the lobby of one in the Midwest when a tall, rangy, fair-haired young man in cowboy boots asks if he can sit down. Because he seems so shy—and because he says he has long admired both me and a particular professional baseball player—I’m surprised. Never before have I been so paired.

  As we talk about his hopes of starting a country inn, I have the odd and overwhelming feeling that I’m talking to another woman. He is a cowboy, very taciturn and masculine, yet I can’t shake the feeling. When I finally get up the courage to say so, he says, “Of course, that’s because I was raised as a girl.”

  Then he tells me this story. I tell you from memory. It isn’t the kind of story that you can forget.

  I grew up in a family that lived outside of town, in a big old house in the desert. There were three generations of us. I knew my grandfather was also my father, and he was also my mother’s father, but I didn’t know there was anything wrong with that. What I did know and hated was that, whenever we stopped for gas and didn’t have enough money, my mother or some other relative would send me into the gas station to do a blowjob for the guy who worked there. I don’t remember when this started, I was maybe four or five, but I had learned to do this sexual service for my grandfather. He used to say that I should have been his granddaughter. Maybe he felt strange about doing this with a boy—my mother began dressing me in girl’s clothes and calling me a girl’s name. When I went to school, I wore boy clothes, but I didn’t have friends. I learned right away that ours was the family other families told their kids not to play with.

  As soon as I was old enough to run away, I lied about my age, and joined the Navy. I felt safer than I ever had at home. Getting out was the fir
st thing that saved me. By the time I came back home and rented a room in town, there was a women’s center where groups talked about a lot of things, including sexual abuse in childhood. I had no idea this had happened to anyone else. The therapist there explained that once women started talking to each other, they discovered that this happened a lot, especially but not only to girls. When survivors needed help but couldn’t afford therapy, this therapist helped them form a group—and I joined; it was six women and me. I discovered it wasn’t my fault. But when people in the town knew we were telling family secrets, even the women’s center had to turn the therapist out. Still, she kept on meeting with us on our own.

  But what really saved me was what you felt. I had dressed and lived as a girl until I was about eight, so I never felt I was a man like my grandfather. As my therapist put it, I never identified with the aggressor. If I had, I might have become an abuser myself. It’s terrible to be a victim, and to believe sex is the only thing you’re worth—without help, girls grow up to keep believing that. But some boys start abusing other people because that’s a way of being a man. That means guilt, being afraid you’ll get arrested if you tell the truth, cutting off all empathy—everything that makes it harder to get out. I wouldn’t say I was lucky—but it would have been worse if I thought I had to control and abuse other people.

  He is telling me his story to say thank you. Because the women’s movement was born of women talking to each other, childhood sexual abuse was revealed to be a fact, not a Freudian fantasy—and children began to be believed.

  We finish our coffee. He is a rare person—a man who knows what it is to be a woman—and also someone who has ended abuse in one generation. I thank him for surviving—and teaching. There are many kinds of lessons on a campus.

  · It’s 1995, and I am at the Dominican College, near San Francisco. Because an outdoor amphitheater on its campus holds a thousand people, it is about to be the site of a fund-raiser for Planned Parenthood. No one has uttered a peep of protest. Planned Parenthood clinics have provided health care for so many for so long that it has become one of the most trusted organizations in America. Even some anti-abortion protesters seem to have figured out that demonstrating against clinics only turns public opinion against them, especially since just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood services are related to abortion.

  But this is the calm before the storm. Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco writes a letter to the college’s president condemning me as a “leading advocate for virtually unrestricted abortion in the United States.” Though the college gets not a penny from the Catholic Church, it was founded by Dominican nuns long ago. They are no longer around to speak for themselves, but the archbishop says their legacy is being betrayed.

  Everything just keeps going, both the accusations and the event. Some contributors do indeed withhold their funds from this college, which is hurtful. But when the trustees hold firm to their support for free speech on campus, new contributions make up for the loss of the old. If anything, the archbishop has only brought more media coverage of an era of declining church membership, aging priests, shutdowns of a dozen historic churches, the revelations of sexual abuse by priests, and many other troubles that caused him to be summoned to the Vatican for a tactical consultation.

  On the day itself, I’m impressed to see a small protest plane circling over the amphitheater, pulling an anti-abortion banner. Someone yells out, “Look, the right-to-lifers have an air force!” There is laughter. The event goes right on. Even though I know this lonely little plane is a commercial one that can be hired for birthdays, weddings, and advertising, the symbolism of its constant circling makes me sad.

  Talking later to Dolores Huerta, my friend of thirty years—a lifetime organizer of farm workers and efforts to elect progressive women—I tell her that I can’t shake the sadness of this symbolic distance between an airplane representing the church and the real lives of women on the ground.

  She reminds me of the organizer’s mantra: Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots.

  Three months later, Archbishop John Quinn retires at the age of sixty-six, nine years ahead of schedule. San Francisco newspapers report that he was too distant from the people.

  · In rural Oklahoma, where oil wells grow in fields next to cattle and winter wheat, I’m talking with a university auditorium full of students in a postlecture discussion. Most people are trying to figure out how to make their daily lives more fair—whether it’s who gets tenure or who gets the kids ready for school—but I notice that an all-white group of twenty or so people in Jesus T-shirts are not taking part.

  Finally, a young T-shirted man stands up to protest my support for legal abortion, which is odd because we haven’t been talking about abortion at all. He says abortion isn’t even in the Constitution, so how can it be protected by it? A female college student who looks about twelve rises to say that women aren’t included in the Constitution either, but now that we’re citizens, we have reproductive freedom as part of a constitutional right to privacy. If the Founding Fathers had included Founding Mothers, that freedom would have been in the Bill of Rights to begin with.

  The crowd applauds. I can see we’ve reached the magical point when people start to answer each other’s questions. I can just listen and learn. An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus T-shirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment “Thou shall not kill.” But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies. Thus the Bible is making clear that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life.

  This quiets the T-shirt wearers, but probably not for long; I can see them conferring. Meanwhile another student rises to object to parental and judicial consent laws that treat a young woman as if she were the property of her parents or the state. “If you’re old enough to get pregnant,” she says, “you’re old enough to get unpregnant.” A man chimes in, pointing out that if a woman serving in the military is raped by another soldier or even by the enemy, she can’t get an abortion in an army hospital or anywhere with government funds. She’s not even guaranteed a leave to find one on her own. There is a rumble of disapproval and learning.

  A nurse arises to explain the metal bracelet she is wearing. It looks like the prisoner of war bracelets that bear the birth date of a loved one, but she explains that hers bears the birth and death dates of Rosie Jimenez, the first woman—but not the last—to die from an illegal abortion because the Hyde Amendment forbids not only the use of military tax dollars but health care or any tax dollars for abortion. Rosie was on welfare, only a few months away from graduating with teaching credentials so she could support herself and her five-year-old daughter. But she got pregnant, crossed the Mexican border to get an illegal abortion, the only kind she could afford, returned to Texas, and spent seven painful and fevered days in a hospital being treated for septic shock—at hundreds of times the taxpayers’ expense of an abortion. She died, leaving behind her daughter and a $700 scholarship check that was proof of Rosie’s promising future. This happened only two months after the Hyde Amendment went into effect. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of women have lost their health or lives since.

  With an eye on the T-shirt group, I explain that reproductive freedom means what it says and also protects the right to have a child. A woman can’t be forced into an abortion, just as she can’t be forced out of childbirth by sterilization or anything else: the women’s movement is as devoted to the latter as the former—including the economic ability to support a child. It just seems lopsided because the opponents of safe and legal abortion have focused there.

  I hope the quiet T-shirt group might be realizing that this protects their choice, too—that government with the power to forbid birth control or abortion cou
ld also enforce one or the other—but no such luck. Suddenly they stand up in unison, chant “Abortion! Murder! Abortion! Murder!” and walk out en masse.

  In the silence that follows, I can feel people trying to figure out what went wrong. I too wonder what I could have said or done. I express my regret at their walkout, which seems to break the spell.

  A young white man in jeans—slender, shy, perhaps in his late twenties—raises his hand and begins a story that seems unrelated. He has invented a new kind of bit for oil rigs. He just sold the patent and received an unexpected amount of money. He would like to donate $90,000, about half of his windfall, to the cause of reproductive freedom as a basic human right—like freedom of speech.

  There is silence, then laughter, and then cheers. Never in my four decades of traveling and fund-raising will anything like this happen again. If people pledge money, it’s usually after an appeal and in requested sums. Also they tend to give according to what others are giving. To me and to everyone in that room, this young man has shown how to give without being asked and according to ability—more than ability, since he is sharing a rare windfall. He has given us all the gift of spontaneity—and hope.

  We stay in touch. He comes to New York and stops to say hello. When I’m on another trip, a young woman introduces herself to me as his sister. When he and I cross paths in Denver, we have breakfast. Every few years, the road seems to bring us together. That day in Oklahoma became a landmark in all our lives.

  II.

  For me, talking and organizing after a campus or any other lecture is the big reward—because then I am learning. We often continue in a restaurant or campus hangout or just sit on the nearest available floor. With a shared lecture to respond to—plus my request to overcome the hierarchical setting and pretend we’re all sitting in a circle, even if there are five hundred or five thousand of us—people get up and say things they might not say to friends or family. It’s as if the audience creates its own magnetic field that draws out stories and ideas.